This Startup Will Pay You To Recycle Your Waste

Hoarding of wastes due to the absence of proper disposal has been a problem in many countries. When we are talking about India, it is even more adverse. With a population growing rapidly, the waste that is being produced is also growing, especially in major cities. According to the statistics, every person tends to create an average of 400-500 gms of residual waste in a day. At this rate, imagine the waste that is created by a city with 10 lakh people. In our country, we find most of the waste littering on the streets, road corners, and vacant lands due to unethical maintenance. At first, they might just appear as eyesores, but eventually, they turn out to be heavy health hazards. If the waste is not disposed earliest on the regular basis, it hosts many diseases caused by scavengers, insects, viruses and bacteria along with odour and pollution.

If you’re one of those people who are facing problems due to improper disposal management, you have to know about the startup Raddiman. Raddiman, an online waste pick-up destination that has been designed to make our lives better and healthier. All you have to do is open the website and schedule a pickup and your waste will be picked up at your doorstep within few minutes.

Launched in May 2015, Raddiman has been constantly providing services to people who face difficulties in disposing of the waste. Coming from Newspapers, Books to Plastic, Raddiman can send all your waste to recycle factories in a single click. Most of the times, we get caught up in our hectic daily schedules that we might not have sufficient time left to send our e-waste to recycle factories or to get hold of the local raddi people. Noticing this predicament, Raddiman has been established, enabling customers to dispose of their waste sitting in their homes. The startup is based in Bangalore with a team of six formidable representatives working on weekends.

The startup is bootstrapped as of now, as the whole investment came from the savings that the founder got from her previous job. Starting with the limited amount, Raddiman is being operated only on the weekends right now. However, the response has been daunting, that they started planning to make it workable on weekdays. This might change the funding pattern due to the need for additional resources. The revenue model is entirely based on the transactions that are done between customers-representatives and representatives-recycle factories. In some cases, they even sell the waste like plastic to scrap wholesalers.

When asked about the inaugural of the startup and the idea behind, Shobha Rani, the Founder said, “I used to sell my old scrap to local raddiwala, at regular intervals. One day, I tried to sell my old computer monitor and had to face a difficulty in selling it. Most of the local people were not actually interested in buying it. That’s when I started looking for alternative options to sell my E-waste which eventually might take it to the manufacturers of the factory. Unable to find one, I got the idea of building a bridge to fill the gap between people who want to dispose of their waste and the factories. How did I get the idea of creating an online platform, if you ask, it came from Amazon, Flipkart and likewise platforms where I used to buy new things in exchange for old things. That’s when I thought, why not scrap? Rest is history.”

When asked about difficulties that she has faced in establishing a platform, Shobha revealed, “ It all started from building a website. As I’m from the non-technical background, I never knew anything much about this. My family helped me in getting this done. Initially, I was petrified about the concept, not knowing if it would work or not. As I’m funding it on my own, it is always little scary you see. That’s why I started it only to be operated on weekends. I got a warehouse on rent and hired temporary workers. The second major issue is to find recycle factories that would accept our waste.”

Currently, Raddiman has been covering stress across East Bangalore, Sarjapur Road, Bellandur, Whitefield, Marathahalli and JP Nagar. It also had few apartments that approached for periodic bulk pickups. “It’s amazing to know that most of the client who schedules the pickups are women. I’m glad that we are making their lives a tad bit easier”, grinned Shobha. The services offered by Raddiman are pragmatic as they buy almost everything unlike the raddiwalas. Though, materials like wood and glass are off the list, but they are trying to indulge them in the domain. The genuinity in the weighing procedure is elevated by the usage of ISO certified e-weighing machines that generate precise measures. The pricing is so palpable that you find them ecstatic. To know about the prices, you can go the homepage of Raddiman and click on “View all rates”. However, the candor lies in scheduling the pickup. You don’t have to register yourself or login for a pickup. All you have to do is enter your address in the website or WhatsApp them on their number (8880995710).

Talking about the future goals, Shobha says, “If we get more orders and if quantity exceeds a threshold value, then we provide the better rate for the newspaper. Whatever rate is shown on our website is the fixed rate and we have never offered any other rate across Bangalore and it increases customer’s trust on us. Currently, we are seeing the very good response for the service. Month over Month, we are seeing more than 50% growth in a unique number of users visiting the website. We saw that around 35% of customers were using mobile devices, so recently we moved to the mobile optimized website, after which we are seeing the lot more engagement from customers. Now we are getting our Android app built and it may be out anytime soon. Initially, we started with one pickup van a day during weekends, but recently because of heavy bookings, we had to increase the number of parallel vehicles running for pickup. Now we are planning to extend the scrap pickup on weekdays too. We are also aggressively looking to expand our service to other parts of Bangalore. As we are getting more orders from a particular pin code, we are adding that Pin Code as a supported pickup area. Currently, we have already served around 600 unique customers, with 40% repeated rate. This looks good when you see that this scrap service is of a type which sometimes is repeated as long as 6-7 months later”.

Knowing the veracity of Raddiman and their prices, customers doesn’t even bargain. In few cases, customers don’t charge for the waste taking it as a contribution towards good environment. Raddiman is working to reward them with gifts after multiple pickups at regular intervals. Have waste to be disposed at your home in Bangalore? What are you waiting for? Schedule a pickup already.

An engineer by education and an entrepreneur by choice. Asish is a TCS Best Student Awardee, NDTV featured student entrepreneur and International School of Entrepreneurship Education awardee. He also worked with many startups and big companies for their business development and strategical growth. Asish has been heading The Startup Journal since its inception in 2014.